How does the 33 crisis card work?

By Red Bart, in Battlestar Galactica

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The 33 crisis card has three steps:

1. Activate raiders

2. Setup a number of ships.

3. Keep this card in play. Discard and reshuffle in the deck when a basestar or a civilian ship is destroyed.

The third step is what gets me confused. Do you repeat steps 1 and 2 each turn until a basestar/civilian ship is desroyed? Or do you only activate the raiders each turn until a basestar/civilian ship is destroyed? Or does this card work some other way?

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Actually, step 3 reads "Keep this card in play until a civilian ship or basestar is destroyed. If this card is in play when the fleet jumps, shuffle it back into the Crisis deck."

So: After laying out the ships, you keep Thirty-Three "in play" somewhere on the board.

  • If a civilian ship OR a basestar gets destroyed while Thirty-Three is on the board, Thirty-Three goes to the discard pile. It is no longer "in play".
  • If Thirty-Three is still in play by the next Jump (that is, it hasn't been discarded) , Thirty-Three gets shuffled back into the Crisis deck. This means it could get drawn again.

SPOILER: Thematically, this represents the episode "33", where a swarm of cylons attacked the fleet every 33 minutes. The fleet survived only when the Galactica crew realized one of the civilian ships had a tracker and destroyed that ship.

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To further clarify, you do NOT repeat steps 1 or 2. Placing the card in play is simply a reminder of that Crisis card's ongoing effects. Raiders and such are handled normally. :-)

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Very logical really :) Thanks!

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In long range terms what it means is that unless a basestar or civilian ship goes down the mix of cards goes up in its ratio of cards to cylon attacks. THe baseline is 10 cylon attack cards per 70 cards in the deck. So 1 in 7 (14%). If you get 20 cards out, one normal attack and and one '33' and that goes back into the deck you suddenly have 9 in 50 (18%).

Also any bad cards your friendly Boomer or Roslin have managed to drop to the bottom of the deck are suddenly possible again - which ay be good or bad depending on how friendly those two are.